Take Your List Building To The Next Level With Push Notifications

We all know how important it is for a business to build a list of customers’ emails. And, the larger, the better. No secret that one of my personal objectives are exactly the same.
However, a few months ago I accidentally discovered a new tool for building your list without even asking visitors to provide their email address. This technique is called push notification.
If you are using smartphones or tablets, then you probably know what push notifications are. For example, when you install an app on your smartphone you automatically allow the program to send notifications to your phone. It’s those messages you receive from the app. And it could be a great marketing channel, but building an app for a small business might be too expensive and often they cannot afford it.
But, I had a chance to try out a tool called PushCrew which allows you to send notifications to people through the web browser without building any applications. And, you can send notifications not only to smartphones and tablets, but desktop computers as well. How cool is that?

How does it work?

When a user visits your website, he receives a popup message asking if he would like to receive notifications from you. The message could be customized individually, so you can adapt it based on the type of your business.

Once a person agrees to get notifications from you, he is added to your list and from that moment you will be able to send him various messages. How these messages look like you can see in the picture below.

As you can see, when a user’s browser is opened the notification pops up at the bottom right of the screen. If you click on it, you will be taken to the link that was assigned to that message.

How to set it up?

The setup of this tool is very easy. If you have tried to add Google Analytics or Facebook Pixels to your website, then it should be a piece of cake for you. First, you need to register at PushCrew. Go to the Dashboard and in ‘‘Settings→Customize for Desktop‘ create the message you want to show to your visitors. After that, go to ‘Settings->Get Code‘ and copy the code.

This code needs to be inserted on every page of your website before the tag. Just like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels. After you’ve done that, you are finished and ready to go!

Who could benefit from it?

First of all – e-commerce. Email marketing is important to every business, but often they are read only after few hours or even days. Usually, it’s ok most of the time, but there might be some situations when you will want to send last-minute offers and emails become not so effective as you would like them to be. That’s where notifications might show their true potential. They reach customers instantly, so it could be a perfect channel to inform about last-hour sales, special short-term discounts and stock clearances.
Bloggers should also benefit from that. It could be another great channel to notify subscribers about upcoming webinars or other live events. Also, you can send various announcements about your business or use it just as an addition to email marketing.
And, there are many more ways you can use this tool for your business. It is just a matter of your imagination. Keep in mind that you have a limited amount of characters you can use in your message. Keep it short and clear. This tool is quite new, so it is hard to tell what works and what does not. You need to keep testing until you find what brings good results to your business.

Also, PushCrew is not the only tool offering this kind of service. There’s Pushengage and many more. You can easily find them through Google. I am using PushCrew because after testing few of them it was the most attractive to me. You can sign up for a free trial and use until you reach 500 subscribers. After you hit the limit, you will have to upgrade your account. But until then, enjoy this tool without any worries.

Have you already tried this tool? What is your opinion on this topic? If you have something to add I welcome you to leave a message on Twitter, Facebook or just send an email to me.